Colourful chronicler of life

''Britain was a terrific place'' ... David Potts moved to London in 1950 and soon found work with pioneering publications. Photo: Anthony Browell

David Potts was one of the last of a remarkable generation of photographers that first sought, and then found, recognition in Britain in the 1950s and '60s.

During five years freelancing in London, the young Australian seamlessly applied his command of visual irony and sometimes acerbic humour to post-war Britain - then embracing peace, its new queen and social change.

Taken only eight years after war's end, Potts' wry photograph of an immaculately dressed middle-aged British couple watching the Henley-on-Thames regatta personified a Britain reasserting gentler traditions after the savagery of war.

David Haddon Potts was born in Sydney on July 22, 1926, the son of Dr Theo Potts and his wife, Violet, of Glebe. After high school, Potts served with the RAAF in 1944 before doing photographic training under the repatriation scheme in 1945.

He gained more practical experience in photography at the University of Sydney's department of medical illustration. He then worked at the Russell Roberts Studio, training with future luminaries Laurie Le Guay and John Nisbett.

Commercial illustrative photography was clearly not for Potts, however. With a friend, David Moore, he had discovered a mutual passion for documentary photography and Potts ambitiously decided to travel to London in 1950 to seek work.

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In Britain, Potts soon found assignments with pioneering British publications then using documentary images innovatively: The Observer, Life and the legendary Picture Post.

From the beginning he saw beyond the orthodoxies of photojournalism. Impressionistic colour images he created in London initially seemed at odds with his witty, sometimes arch observations of British (and European) life made then.

However, Potts continued to refine his craft as a documentary photographer in London, regularly completing assignments conveying social comment at the highest level.

He became as comfortable photographing the newly proclaimed and politically charged Israel, the Crufts pets show in London, or a citizen striding along the village lanes of partitioned Cyprus. Based on the magazine work Potts did in the 1950s, it would have been easy to assumed he was evolving into a classic photojournalist, pure and simple. Not quite.

Despite his ability to accurately reflect British post-war life - as in Spectators Royal Henley, 1953, and his classic pet show image Best in Show, Crufts Cat Show, London, 1953, Potts also searched for a freer, extravagant colour palette, perhaps as counterpoint to his socially aware black and white documentary photography. But his reasons for experimenting in colour and creating adventurous compositions like Piccadilly Circus, London, 1953, were, he claimed when interviewed in 2010, deceptively simple.

"I [just] wanted to explore what the [new] colour films would do.'' Life magazine heard of Potts's new colour photographs and paid 25 guineas just to see his first images.

The year 1953 was a remarkably successful one. ''I covered the Queen's coronation in London for Life magazine as well as the Festival of Britain - the best festival I have ever been to," Potts recalled nostalgically in 2010. ''Britain was a terrific place [then]. They had recently announced the first jet airliner, the Comet, and television had just been introduced.''

Potts's career flourished in London between 1950 and 1955, freelancing for all the great magazines. Despite his command of black and white reportage, he continued to explore the sensual nature of colour by applying a liberating, unorthodox visual grammar to his pictures: longer exposures coupled with a large-format view camera's flexibility in rendering perspective and depth of field.

On returning to Australia in 1955, Potts soon showed what he had learned in Britain, displaying documentary images and several distinctly painterly colour photographs in the pioneering and influential Six Photographersgroup exhibition at David Jones's art gallery in Sydney. This featured Potts, Max Dupain, Kerry Dundas, Axel Poignant, Hal Missingham and Gordon Andrews.

Potts soon responded to a changing nation by providing pungent, graphic black and white photographs of Australia's perceived mediocre urban environment for the crusading architect Robin Boyd's 1962 book The Australian Ugliness and the 1964 Royal Australian Institute of Architects' exhibition Australian Outrage.

But even as Potts returned successfully to Australia, a darker current entered his life, to deeply affect, and ultimately constrain, his career. He was diagnosed with depression and battled its crippling effects for the rest of his life.

Despite this, Potts never lost either his love of making photographs or his notoriously robust, wry sense of humour. One friend recalls driving him home after a course of ECT shock therapy at the Prince of Wales Hospital.

They passed a mechanic's workshop and the driver idly remarked: "I have to go back there later this week to have my [car's] head re-tensioned." From the back seat came Potts's distinctively gruff, rumbling voice: ''Do you think they could handle two?''

Potts never quite relinquished his exploration of colour photography, often using seemingly mundane subjects such as liquorice confectionery and occasionally, perhaps in solidarity with the American photographer Edward Weston, a capsicum. Potts liked telling how Weston's lover, Tina Modotti, while shopping, saw a sensually-shaped capsicum she thought Weston might enjoy photographing. After Weston had taken the picture that later achieved world fame as his Pepper No 30, Weston and Modotti dined on the luckless vegetable. Weston remarked later, in his diaries The Daybooks, that he felt like ''a cannibal'' eating that pepper.

Among the many fine documentary photographs, colourist fantasies and still-life images Potts made over six decades, it is possible to glimpse the arc of a career that always had the capacity to surprise.

He saw beyond the first urgent, instinctive desire to make a picture. Whether through peerless social observation, or playful, sometimes edible still-life subjects, Potts invited us to appreciate photography with the same sense of wonder he displayed in a long career, but one necessarily curtailed by his illness.

"David Potts's photographs had a distinctive, emotional tone and sensitivity unusual in Australian photojournalism of the time," the senior photography curator at the National Gallery of Australia, Gael Newton, said.

''The depression from which David suffered meant there was an edge that was very subtle … a melancholia, an anxiety in his pictures. He [also] had a sense of humour, which you can see. It's a shame [that] at that exact point of the '70s photography revival, established professionals were being celebrated, but he was not."

Nonetheless, Potts never lost interest in photography's community and he delighted in the recent renaissance in Australia's younger image-makers, such as this newspaper's Tamara Dean and Dean Sewell.

Potts's photographs are held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery, Canberra; the National Gallery of Victoria; the Art Gallery of South Australia; the Art Gallery of NSW; the Powerhouse Museum and the State Library of NSW.

There will not be a funeral; instead, a wake for family and friends will be held at the gallery of his close friend and agent, Josef Lebovic, in Kensington, at a date to be announced.

David Potts never married. He is survived by his nephews, the Sydney photographer and film director Tony Potts; the director of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Timothy Potts, and Theo Potts, also of Sydney, and his cousin Judy Halliwell.